ASSIGNMENT

Assignment On Qualitative And Quantitative Research

Assignment On Qualitative And Quantitative Research

Conducting at least one basic market research is highly important for developing a high-quality product or service. There are different techniques that used by highly trained people to conduct market research. Market research, for a new product, used to know the customer needs and wants so as to analyze the target market of your product. In analyzing customer needs and wants, research might generate data that is not worth useful but, at the same time, it provide major understanding of an organization's related area (Paul, 1997, p. 23).

Sometime companies believe that they know their customers, and they know what customer needs, and wants are. In this scenario, companies sometime fail to meet the needs of the customers. It is mandatory to conduct certain activities to find out your customer's actual needs and wants for products and services. This is fortunate for companies that there are empirical methods that businesses can use to know all these. Market research is one of those techniques (Browne, 2010, p. 60-64).

Developing a product that people need and placing it on shelves for selling where most of the customer's visit and set a nominal price which, every normal customer can afford. Companies can do this easily once they know all these about the customer. However, customers want, identifying where they will go to buy the product and the right price that they can afford, knowing all of these require a research to be done (Swarming the shelves, 2006, p. 90).

In order to conduct the market research for knowing customer needs and wants, the marketing mix is an important strategy to get started. Studying the marketing mix is important to avoid future hassles (Campion, 1994, p. 79).

There are two major types of research methods that used by organizations for conducting any research. These research methods broadly categorized into two categories namely, qualitative and quantitative(Dick, 2002, p. 77-80). The types of qualitative that focus the needs and wants of customers are Interviews and the quantitative technique that being used is survey methods or the questionnaire technique (Joshi, 2005, p. 35). Like any other industry, knowing customer's needs and wants are of immense importance for an FMCG industry. FMCG is a vast industry with major players like Unilever, Nestle and others. Because of the intense competition in these industries, it is highly important for companies to constantly stay updated with their customers need and want (Bernard, 1994, p. 81).

Qualitative methods inquires the needs and wants of customers and what are the factors that shape such needs and wants of the customers (Miles, 1994, p. 41). In order to derive the date through qualitative research, a sample of a large population is used. Population comprises of the entire target market that a company focuses on. In most of the situations, it is not possible for companies to use the whole population for research; therefore, a sample is derived from that ...